The son of the under-gardener was a steady ten-year-old three hundred
and sixty-four days of the year, and his Scottish blood commended him
to Robert Halarkenden and inspired a confidence not justified on the
three hundred and sixty-fifth day.
"Angus," said Halarkenden, regarding the boy with a blue glance like a
blow, "the young mistress wishes this letter posted to catch the noon
train. The master has sent for me and I canna take it. You will"--the
bony hand fished in the deep pocket and brought out a nickel--"you will
hurry with this letter and post it immediately." "Yes, sir," said
Angus, and Robert Halarkenden turned to go to the master of the great
house, ill in his great room, with no doubt about the United States
mails. While Angus, being in the power of the three hundred and
sixty-fifth day, trotted demurely into the meshes of Fate.
Fate was posing as another lad, a lad of charm and adventure. "C'm on,
Ang," proposed Fate in nasal American; "Evans's chauffeur's havin' a
rooster-fight in the garage. Hurry up--c'm on--lots of fun." And
while Angus, stirred by the prospect, struggled with a Scotch
conscience, the footman from next door sauntered up, a good-natured
youth, and, stopping, caught the question.
"Get along to your chicken-fight," he adjured Angus, and took the
letter from his hand. "I'm on my way to the post-office now. I'll
mail it as good as you, ain't it?" And Angus fled up the street along
with Fate. While Tom Mullins thrust the letter casually into a
coat-pocket and dropped in to see his best girl, and, in a bit of
horse-play with that lady, lost the letter. "Sure, I mailed it," he
answered Angus's inquiries that afternoon, and Angus passed along the
assurance, not going into details, and every one concerned was
satisfied.
While, in a Parish House many miles down the railed roads that measure
the country, a man waited. And waited, ever with a sicker
restlessness, a more unendurable longing. Saturday came, and the man
hoped, till the hour for any boat's sailing was long past, for a
letter, another telegram. Then, "She has had it mailed after she
left," he reasoned, and all of Monday and Tuesday he waited and watched
and invented reasons why it might come to-morrow or even later--even
from the other side--from Germany. Two weeks, three, and then four, he
held to varying fictions about the letter, which Arline Baker, the lady
of Tom Mullins's heart, had picked up from the floor that day in
October and tucked into a bureau drawer to give to Tom--tucked under a
summer blouse. And the weather had turned chilly, helping along Fate
as weather will at times, and the summer blouse had not been worn, and
the letter had been forgotten.
Then there came a day when he took measures with himself, because
suspense and misery were eating his strength. He faced the situation;
he had poured his heart, keeping back nothing, at her feet. And she
had not answered, except with a few words of a telegram. He knew, by
that, that she had got his letter, the first love-letter of his life.
But she had not cared enough to answer it. Or else, his faith in her
argued, something had happened, there had been some unimaginable reason
to prevent her answering. That the letter had been lost was so
commonplace a solution that it did not occur to him. One does not
think of mice setting off gunpowder magazines. At all events he was
facing a stone wall; there was no further step to take; she must be in
Germany; he did not know her address; if he did, how could he write
again? A man may not hound a woman with his love. Yet he was all but
mad with anxiety about her, beyond this other suffering. Why had she
suddenly gone to Germany? What did that mean? In his black struggles
for enlightenment, he believed sometimes that, in a fantastic attack of
_noblesse oblige_, she had married the other man and gone to Germany
with him. That thought drove him near insanity. So he gathered up,
alone before his fire, all these imaginings and doubts, and sat with
them into the night, and made a packet of them, and locked them away,
as well as he might, into a chamber of his memory. And the next day he
flung himself into his work as he had not been able ever to do before;
he made it his world, and resolutely shut out the buoyant voice and the
personality so intimately known, so unknown. He tried to be so tired,
at night, that he could not think of her; and he succeeded far enough
to make living a possibility, which is all that any of us can do
sometimes. Often the thought of her, of her words, of her letters, of
the gay voice telling of a hideous future, stabbed him suddenly in the
night, in the crowded day. But he put it aside with a mighty effort
each time, and each time gained control.
And then it was May, and in June he was to have his vacation. And once
more the doubt of his fitness for his work was upon him. The stress of
the tremendous gait of the big parish, and the way he had thrown his
strength by handfuls into the work, had told. If a healthy and happy
man uses brain and heart and body carefully it is perhaps true that he
cannot overwork. But if a high-strung man gives himself out all day
long, every day, recklessly, and is at the same time under a mental
strain, he is likely to be ill. Geoffrey McBirney was close to an
illness; his attitude toward life was warped; he was reasoning that he
had made the girl a test case and that the case had failed; that it was
now his duty to stand by the test and give up his work. And then, one
day, the letter came. The weather had turned warm in Forest Gate and
Arline Baker had got out her summer blouses.
October 10th [it was dated].
This morning, after I had read your letter it was as if I were being
beaten to earth by alternate blows, like thunder, like lightning,
fierce and beautiful and terrible, of joy and of grief.
For I care--I care--I can't wait to tell you--I'm so glad, so
triumphant, so wretched that I care--that it's in me to care,
desperately, as much as any woman or man since the foundation of the
world. It's in me--once you said it wasn't--and you have brought it to
life, and I care--I love you. I want to let you come so that it left
me blind and shaking to send that telegram. But there isn't any
question. If I let you come I would be wicked. I, with my handful of
broken life, to let you manacle your splendid years to a lump of stone?
Could you think I would do that? Don't you see that, because I care,
I'm so much more eager not to let you? I'm selfish and my first answer
to that letter was a rush of happiness. I forgot there was anything in
time or space except the flood which carried me out on a sea of just
you--the sweeping, overwhelming many waters of--you. I wonder if you'd
think me brazen if I told you how it seemed? As if your arms were
around me, and the world reeling. Some of those clever psychologists,
James or Lodge, I can't remember who, have a theory that to higher
beings the past and present and future are all one; no divisions in
eternity. It seemed like that. Questions and life and right and wrong
all dissolved in the white heat of one fact. I didn't see or hear or
know. I put my head on the table, on your writing, in my locked room,
and simply felt--your arms.
If this were to be a happy love-affair I couldn't write this; I would
have decent reserve--I hope; I would wait, maybe, and let you find out
things slowly. But there isn't time--oh, there isn't any time. I have
to tell you now because this is the last. You can't write again; I
won't let you throw away your life; I'm not worth much, generally
speaking, but I'm worth your salvation just now if I have the strength
to give it to you. And I'm staggering under the effort, but I'm going
to give it to you. I'm going to keep you away.
It was realizing that I must do this which beat me to earth with those
terrible, bright, sharp swords. You see I'm starting off suddenly with
Uncle Ted. He is very ill, with heart trouble, and the doctors think
his chance is to get to Nauheim at once. It was decided last night,
and we had passage engaged for Saturday within an hour, and then this
morning the letter came. As soon as I could pull myself together a
little I began to see how things were, and it looked to me as if
somebody--God maybe--had put down a specific hand to punish my useless
life and arrange your salvation. My going away is the means He is
using.
For you are such a headstrong unknown quantity, that if I had seen you,
I couldn't have held you, and how could I have fought the exquisite
sweetness and glamour that is through even your written words, that
would make me wax in your hands, if you had been here and I had heard
your voice and seen your eyes and felt your touch; oh, I would have
done it--I _must_ do it--but it would have killed me I think. It's
more possible this way.
For I'm going indefinitely and all I have to do is to suppress my
address. Just that. You can't find it out, for Robin is going away
too; he is to do some work of mine while I am gone; and you can't come
here and inquire for "August First," can you, now? So this is all--the
end. Suddenly I feel inadequate and leaden. It is all over--the one
chance for real happiness which I have had in my butterfly days--over.
But you have changed earth and heaven--I want you to know it. I can't
even now say that if Uncle Ted shouldn't need me; if the hideous,
creeping monster should begin its work visibly on me, that I might not
some day use the pistol. But I do say that because of you I will try
to make any living that I may do count for something, for somebody. I
am trying. You are to know about that in time.
And now the color is going out of my life--you are going. Some day you
will care for some one else more than you think now you care for me.
I'm leaving you free for that--but it's all I can do. Why must my life
be wreck and suffering? Why may I not have the common happinesses?
Why may I not love you--be there for you "at the end of the day"? The
blows are raining hard; I'm beaten close to earth. Has God forsaken
me? I can only cling tight to the thin line of my duty to Uncle Ted; I
can't see any further than that. Good-by.